In-N-Out is the only fast food place I've been lately where I was actually surprised at how good it was.

Honestly, where I'm sitting, takeout from better restaurants is only a few dollars more than the average fast food meal, and it's universally healthier and tastier. Or it would be healthier, if I wasn't so into chorizo.

gammafunk wrote:Have you ever made a breakfast burrito with chorizo? Good imo.

I recently discovered that if I make chorizo at home, the smoke from the oil makes me have significant trouble breathing. Therefore, in the future, my chorizo-based foodstuffs will come from people who cook it for me.

Salty McDonald's haters will never acknowledge that the McDouble has the highest protein-to-dollar ratio of any commercial food in the multiverse. Two doubles, 780cal, 46g protein, $2.89, and you're guaranteed to find one even when you're in the deep woods visiting your Trumplandia relatives. And no matter who they pulled off the street and paid minimum wage to make my burger, it will taste good and have exactly the 2.5 pickles you were counting on.

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My mom took my son to Five Guys and they brought home the fries he couldn't eat. They were delicious cold. Delicious. Cold. French fries. yes the burgers are overpriced, but where else can you get a bucket of awesome fries for $3?

MainiacJoe wrote:My mom took my son to Five Guys and they brought home the fries he couldn't eat. They were delicious cold. Delicious. Cold. French fries. yes the burgers are overpriced, but where else can you get a bucket of awesome fries for $3?

Yeah those cajun fries are outta control and they always dump like fifty hundred more fries in the bag after they're done filling your cup

fuck mcdonalds and kfc. burger king is awful as well, maybe 10-20% better than mcdonalds, but i won't lie, i practically live next to one and have eaten there while watching their TV channel on select occasions (a lot of bottom tier german pop with awful videos on there, very entertaining).

subway is ok, it's the only place i go to regularly (1x/week on average) so i'm quite bored of it, but it's the best fast food chain we have here. these days i usually get cream cheese, tuna and the oat bread, sauce and salads will differ. subway is close to my lab and usually quite empty so i can hide from my coworkers there

berlin has a lot of Döner/halloumi/falafel shops, which is fast food and nearly universally the same between shops (regarding menu, sauce and salad selection), but generally they don't belong to a larger chain. the meat usually looks revolting, falafel and halloumi are usually ok, the cheese might be rubbery. this is the most popular type of fast food among the people here, i think

ZipZipskins wrote:Burger King is most certainly not better than McDonald's

Then again I've never eaten either of them in Berlin

Depends on the location, burger kings have more variation in quality than mcdonalds, the best locations are better than the best mcdonalds, the worst ones are significantly worse than the worst mcdonalds.

It has a lot to do with how clean they keep their grill, burgers cooked on a dirty machine taste like old burned grease.

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I used to go to this mcdonalds to chill between classes because they had tvs showing the news/to stay out of the weather. Well next thing I know they ripped the TVs out because apparently they made it too appealing for people who wanted to stay there all day.

a few times I saw someone get banned from mcdonalds. that was my favorite thing for two reasons. first of all, how fucked up do you have to be to get banned from mcdonalds! I mean the employees at this one would for the price of a mcchicken and a dollar large drink, let you sit there for hours doing crossword puzzles and skipping class, and you could refill that cocksucker as many times as you want no problem. But this one dude comes in with his dirty ass thermos and fills it up with powerade and the manager comes up with him and says, "you can't do that sir, you're banned for a week." The other fantastic thing about it was how indignant people got. I mean these people would start shouting at the manager, you can't ban me! and this is ridiculous, I didn't even do anything!

This same instance escalated when the guy stealing soda (by the way, people in this town would order a "large coke" no matter what soda they were going to get at the fountain. 'coke' is not a generic term...this is one of the reasons I moved away from that shithole) anyway the guy stealing soda calls the manager a fat fuck, and the manager just looks him in the eye and says "you're banned"

they pulled the tvs off the wall but this was twice as entertaining my god.

I stopped going there soon after that but by the end they had contracted a security guard to just plant himself by the counter and, I shit you not, check out the people who were refilling their sodas to make sure they hadn't just grabbed a cup out of the trash, and also to enforce bannings. This McDonalds had so many auxiliary employees you can't imagine. Not only was there the security guard, who (I'm not making a single bit of this up) stood by the counter wearing sunglasses half the time, hand over hand at his waist like he got the pose watching secret service members in the movies, and he wore FINGERLESS GLOVES!

Man the employees in this place would always grin at me and ask me why I was smiling so big. I just said, "guess I'm just in a good mood today" because what am I going to tell them, "your restaurant is a complete circus, a slice of the most insane American stereotypes made manifest. Your onions come out of a fucking caulking gun and your chicken has bubbles in it and comes in 4 blow-molded shapes, and I'm about to eat this shit. That's the big joke"?

Anyway, aside from this bouncer clown was Armando's son of Armando's Towing who sat in the parking lot from about 8-5 becase the mcdonalds was in such a prime location that they'd constantly be dealing with people parking in the lot just to go to some other place. Every 45 minutes or so Armando Jr. would walk in, maybe get a refill for his large drink, and shout "Silver Chevy? Anyone drive a silver Chevy Malibu?" and the owner better hope he wasn't on the John because Armando was about to tow your car the fuck out of there.

Note that in parts of Texas, and large chunks of the south, "coke" is considered the generic term for soda apparently. First time I ever heard it was when I stopped to eat in Arkansas and asked for a Coke and the waitress replied "What kind, hon?" At that point I knew at least one of us was crazy, but I wasn't quite sure who.

n1000 wrote:I used to go to this mcdonalds to chill between classes because they had tvs showing the news/to stay out of the weather. Well next thing I know they ripped the TVs out because apparently they made it too appealing for people who wanted to stay there all day.

I expected to see also "then they started to keep all doors and windows open to let the weather in" :)

Quiznos: kind of tastes good but the ingredients aren't excellent quality for the price (havent been in several years)

arbys: what's the point of this place

sonic: always thought sonic was weird. they seem to advertise their fruity drinks more than burgers and stuff—is the food actually good? (I'll try to check them out some time, too)

Dennys thesis: I used to go to denny's a huge amount; one, in particular, was what home base, a rendezvous point, for late-night peregrinators in my home town. We'd rendezvous in the Trader Joe's parking lot before cruising downtown on foot, down and back to the oceanfront, like your prep school's robotics team would enforce its turf. After long evenings reflecting on rising disillusionment, inevitably, every "better" joint would have shut its doors, and we (the ones with the most endurance for fucking around all night) each secretly pleased, would grab a booth in dennys.

the dennys downtown was a marvel. as long as you weren't a drunken military dick, stuffing you and your ungainly date's bellies with greasy garbage after a few hours of hapless standing shoulder-to-shoulder, ass-to-ass, just drinking, what else, in one of the four worst "clubs" on the West Coast, the servers would treat you with immaculate hospitality. We would sit down, grab a coffee apiece, and drain the cup over and over again (they actually honored free refills then) until we were so hopped up and frantic that the only thing keeping you from bursting would be to dash, gulping, into the cool night air.

Friend and I would skip, laughing, down the street, punning, wisecracking, musing about the secret joys to be found in the crushing ennui of half-lonely adolescence. But there was one subject prominent among all that, C——.

the waitstaff at that particular Dennys exemplified a level of amiable professionalism, despite the obnoxious drunks, that made downing twelve coffees more than a pleasure. C—— was something else. I could go on and say C—— was radiant, was beautiful, leggy, sultry-eyed, whatever, but it's not true. C—— appealed to Friend and I on a different sensory channel. It was obvious. You could reason about it intellectually. There was everyone else in the whole city, a bunch of random fuckers, and there was C——, whose minute mannerisms, her wry, sardonic way of smiling without an atom of malice, the way she tied her long hair, her expressive eyebrows, highlighted her like a Kirlian aura to the two of us.

Literal tunnel vision when she walked back with a fresh pot. If you've experienced it, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, I can't describe it.

The first night we met her, we wandered outside as usual joking about whatever, exuberance ever so slightly dimmed, something on the mind.

"Hey, what did you think about um our server"

"yeah. yeah I noticed man"

like matching a psychic md5 hash, our feelings towards C—— were revealed, unequivocal and mutual. We skipped down to the shorefront fantasizing out loud. None of that gross shit. C—— was angelic.

***

I've gone back a few times. A tourist's decade aged the town. Music shop shut down, used book place with the mean guy is something wack now. It feels like no one fucking lives there, you know? Evict the weirdos and slap in chipotle but for poke bowls. I mean it's fine but everything is fine. My hometown is perpetually under construction demolishing everything familiar to be replaced by something Fine.

I hope the tourists are happy, and the drunk millitary shitheads, too, who've finally beaten Denny's. C—— was the spirit of the place. They refill your coffee twice. She's gone now. Waiters don't say ten words to you. I never told her my name. The food is somehow oily yet dry. I don't really like Denny's anymore.